Dorienne's Log

It’s been 21 days! If I’d waited ’til tomorrow, it would have been 22 days and I’d be turning 22! Xanga keeps me all these changes on me….

None of my goals have been accomplished. It’s the same song of my life. Although yesterday, I did make it to church since I didn’t get to go last week. It felt good to be around everyone. I’m getting to know everyone there pretty well. I really missed it, even though I didn’t like everything he had to say. I managed to hold my tongue when the bulletins noted the sermon “The Gospel According to Forrest Gump” and “Forrest” was spelled with one “r.” It was difficult, but I made it.

As I approach my 22nd year in the world I have been gazing back to the events that transpired during my 21st year. While so many of goals have gone unseen, I still feel like I am a better person. In the past year, I have not made any progress with my education, I have not completed any novels and I have not completed my website. I have not met “the one,” or lost any weight or given up any vices. I feel like I’m turning 38 and so feeling of utmost dispair through my lack of accomplishment sometimes seems overbearing. But…

In the past year, I’ve learned to properly code HTML, which can be another vice, but a useful vice. I’ve applied this new knowledge to create better sites for others to enjoy and it also opens up the possibility for future paid work. I’ve done other things and learned a lot about myself, but the most important of all these things is that I’ve found my way back to Jesus.

I’d been lost, truly lost, for a long time, and now, even with all the things that have gone wrong in this past year, I still feel like I’m a better person than I was last year. My Sundays are now for God instead of recovering from whatever I poured down my throat Saturday night. I swear less, I drink less and I try harder to do things that would make Jesus proud of me. I feel like I know more about who I am, I am more in tuned with my own culture, and I have come to understand why I do so many of the things I do.

….

Thinking about this actually brings me to tears, because I guess I just realized that everything I’d been told about God my whole life is true. He has a plan for me regardless of the plans I have for myself. This year, instead of being depressed that I am growing another year older, a problem that has persisted since I turned 14, I am going to be happy that God has allowed me to grow and learn for a little bit longer.

Leave Xanga for two weeks and they change everything on you…

Oh well. I’m back and again, nothing much has been happening.

All my “friends” hate me now. It happens, but I know when I’m right and this is one of those situations. A-B is effectively screwing me over for the rest of this year and the next, but I will hold my head high and smile nonetheless. This week is going to be excruciating there. I have so much to do it’s really just ridiculous. They do this every year. The “let’s wait to until the last second and ask Dorienne to do a million tasks at once” attitude is getting old. I have to teach, that which is difficult enough to learn for my own needs let alone teach when no one else knows what’s going on. The whole thing just makes me sad and I’m in desperate need for a vacation. Luckily for me, I’m having surgery again and I’ll have plenty of time to “rest.”

I’ve just been feeling so low and useless lately and I’m not sure what, if anything, I can do to remedy the situation. I think I’m just ready for a change. I’ve been here for far too long and I need to see some new faces and do some new things. I think I just feel especially down today, because I was just soooooo tired in church today and I left immediately after the service. The Lord’s Supper service just kept going on and on and on. I had half a mind to just get up and walk out; I was just so tired I could barely focus. I understand how important communion is. I really do. But I have yet to see the significance of saying the same exact things over and over again in a hundred different ways month after month. It’s always the same people there every single Sunday. We all know what’s up. It’s getting to the point where I’m considering not attending the first Sunday’s service, just to avoid these annoyingly long lectures about communion. Every month, I just feel like, “Please! Just give me the cracker and the juice and let me be on my way!”
I think I’ve also been annoyed with church recently, because last week our pastor made such a big to-do about coming to afternoon service as well as morning service, and when I showed up, it had been cancelled. I drove ALL the way down there and then had to drive ALL the way back. Then yesterday, I got to our 10:30 choir practice at 10:33 and waited another 20 minutes before anyone else showed up. Our director was even late. And today in Sunday School, the little booklet they give us, said something I thoroughly did not agree with in regards to evolution versus creation, blah, blah, blah….I honestly don’t see why science and religion feel they must mix. You can’t test faith. You can’t make experiments on it. It is what it is. Science is based on testable, reproducible facts. Religion is based on faith. Why must the two be set in comparison all the time?! Why is that I can’t believe in both evolution and creation?! Why can’t anyone else agree with the idea that evolution is what got everything on this Earth to this point and that God is the “why” behind everything?! Why is this a principle that is so difficult for people to understand?! Science is the “how” of anything in the world and faith is the “why” behind that “how.”

Sigh…

I just feel so very sad and I don’t know why.

Maybe because it’s another September and I’m coming ever closer to another birthday without feeling that I’ve accomplished anything. The other day at work, I told everyone that I felt old, like I was closer to my late 30s than my early twenties and they all just laughed and said that I was “cute.” Why? It’s not like they ever felt fifteen years older than they were at my age. So, what’s with the laughter?

I set some goals for myself in my last entry and it was like the next day, that I went back on those same goals; the McDonald’s one anyway. I haven’t had any more since then, but it’s very discouraging to have a goal fresh in your mind and squelch on that goal when you feel trapped. Oh well.
I’m going to work out this week. In one form or another. I need to lose at least ten pounds before my surgery. I’ve told myself that to keep from gaining an exuberant amount of weight like I did with the first surgeries, I was only going to eat when I needed to take pain medication. We’ll see how well that’ll work out.

Okay, time to uplift myself….
Today I will:
Do all my laundry
Clean the bathroom
Finish the subdomain for the wedding pics
Clean my room
Make this stupid video thingy work
Work on my book
Study for next and winter quarter’s

It’s a good list and the best part is that it’s quite doable!

Not much has happened in the past week: my step-brother got married, and that was kind of nice, especially since they have two kids together, but the fact is they did get married. The reception was nice though because I got to spend some time with my step-sibs and cousins and it’s always nice to hang out with a bunch of people my own age for a while. I had a little to drink at the reception, but between the ride home with my parents and the sobering conversation I later had with my mother, all was well for the drive home.

Classes are wrapping up, but I feel no closer to achieving anything, so of course it’s time to set some deadlines/goals for myself.
1) Finish A Ten-Minute Speech by 26 September 2006
– this one is not important in the present, but it could mean the difference between doing what I want to do with my life and doing what I have to do just to make ends meet. Not to mention that this is way overdue. I first put pen(cil) to paper for this thing when I was eleven years old, and eleven years later I still don’t have it completed. NO book should take that long. I’ve “finished” it a couple of times, but it’s never truly been complete. It’s not just the act of completing the book by this deadline, it’s the act of completing something in total. I can’t remember the last time I actually successfully completed anything save for a sentence I was speaking. My birthday marks the beginning of my adult years, and if I can’t complete SOMETHING by the beginning of my adulthood, I might as well stop now. If I can’t finish this book, I have no business even pretending like I want to begin writing others.

2) Get an A in my 139 class.
– There’s no excuse for me not getting an A in this class, and at this point I think I simply need it for my psyche. It’s like, if I could just get the ball rolling, then everything would fall into place.

3) Lose ten pounds by my birthday.
– I’ve been trying to lose this weight since I started to gain and now that I’ve got nearly 100 lbs to get off of me, things are starting to look dire. I went shopping with my mother yesterday, I just looking at myself in the dressing room mirror, made me slightly naseous. I remember when not too long ago, I would have looked at someone who looked like me and giggled to myself wondering how anyone could ever let it get so bad. I guess I had never counted on depression weighing in on the subject. Get it, weighing in….Anyway, a month is MORE than enough time to drop ten pounds. It’s the same old, same old: eat right and exercise, but the when and where causes the issues.

4) No more McDonald’s breakfast. Period.
– If I’m ever going to make a dent in #3, this is a must. I must give up McDonald’s breakfast forever. Given that it was the only thing I ever ate there, I think I just have to go with edict that I just can’t eat at McDonald’s ever again. Probably not ever again, but at least until my birthday in ’07. There’s not nutritional value from it and really it’s not even that satisfying. Feeling the grease and fat from an Egg McMuffin or a hash brown, makes me feel my heart actually congealing. I don’t want to put myself in a position where I could have a heart attack 20-25 years before that should even be a concern. I can do better. I will do better. I guess this isn’t so much a quitting McDonald’s idea as a living a better, healthier life.

5) Read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
– I started this goal a few years ago, and got wholly bogged down by the pages and pages of “begets,” but I think that all Christians should read the whole thing from beginning to end (literally). Even if I don’t understand all of it, even if it does contradict itself, even if it inevitably makes me question my faith in the end, I’ve got until 26 September 2007 to get this goal accomplished. I’ve even got a Bible-reading guide. There’s no reason to get this one done.

…and the little things before the end of this year:
a) Finish my The X-Files website
b) Recode my Calvin and Hobbes website
c) Get an A in Ochem
d) Do Something Great

…time to go a-complishing.